Silvaco just announced an agreement with Avery Designs for the distribution of Avery’s verification IP (VIP) for the MIPI I3C sensor interface protocol, which is used in smartphones, IoT devices and camera systems; and its VIP for in-car network applications based on the CAN- FD / LIN / FlexRay protocols.

I sat down with Chris Browy, VP of Sales and Marketing at Avery Design to learn more about what are the benefits of using their VIP.

Before we dig into the ones and zeroes, how long have you been with Avery Design?

You may be surprised to hear that I have been with Avery Design since 1998, for over 20 years. Prior to that, I was at Cadence for almost 10 years directing both ASIC Design Services, and Top-down IC Design Practice. I guess that makes me a veteran of the industry.

Chris, what was the customer design activity that got us working closely together?

We have been working with joint clients that are creating SoCs for automotive applications. Silvaco has a suite of automotive network protocol IP which are popular – both CAN and FlexRay. For cameras and other kinds of sensors around the vehicle, Silvaco is one of the first vendors to offer the new I3C protocol IP, which replaces I2C interfaces, and enables multidrop serial data buses. Semiconductor design IP must be verified before it goes into an SoC, so it was natural for us to offer a solution where the IP comes from Silvaco and the VIP comes from Avery Design.

Can you talk a little about the Sales activity? Can you name names?

I would love to share customer names with your audience, but why should I let competitors know where we have been winning. Seriously, Silvaco and Avery have worked over half-a- dozen engagements with name brand companies your readers would be familiar with. And on the development side, we have worked closely on creating the VIP for the new I3C interface, so a robust and complete solutions is available to design teams.

Why do Design and Verification managers choose Avery VIP?

The first reason is that we provide SystemVerilog UVM native implementation of the agents and test suite. This makes for fast and easy integration into your SoC testbench and for writing custom SV/UVM tests. We also provide comprehensive protocol, timing and functional checks. So engineers can plug-and-verify quickly.

Second, is our support model. Most, but not all, of our support team is in Asia and we can very quickly respond to questions and issues that pop for both Asian and US verification teams. If you compare our fast support to what the large players offer, you can save weeks of delay and frustration with our team.

Since we are experts in protocols, SystemVerilog and UVM we offer verification services as well to those customers that maybe lacking the resources, time, or expertise to do it in-house.

How does the relationship work between both of the IP and VIP development teams?

The partnership between both development teams is very important. We have SV UVM test suite with 100,000 of code and covers 100,000 different tests. You can imagine how this might be the case for a complex system protocol like PCI Express.

Really, no side can do it on their own. If I look at the new I3C protocol, our VIP has a significant code base of SV/UVM and covers over 100s of test cases. To get this kind of robust compliance each team brings its own perspective and corner cases to the other. So for the I3C VIP we worked a lot with Silvaco to get a complete solution for pre-silicon conformance to the protocol.

Anything you would like to say about working with Silvaco?

Silvaco covers the automotive IP space very well, so we want to make sure your success can be our success as well. The interoperability of our IP and VIP builds confidence in customers’ minds. And on a practical side, Silvaco’s salesforce is something like 20X larger than ours, so Avery gets to leverage all that IP sales activity and Silvaco brings a complete IP / VIP to its customers.

Silvaco has been a good company to work with, and our joint offering of pre-validated test environments is a big success.

Thanks for speaking with me today.

My pleasure. By the way, I didn’t see you at DVCon Silicon Valley this year. It was a great show and attendance was like 50% better than previous years, and there were lots of out-of- town visitors.

I would have liked to have been there but couldn’t spare the time. I will try and check it out next year. You will be exhibiting at DAC again this June in Las Vegas?

Yes, Avery will be there, at our usual spot, near the entrance to the hall. I look forward to seeing you, the Silvaco team, and your readers at the event.

Don’t forget to go to the Stars of IP party at DAC where Silvaco is a co-host!

I never miss it!